Some embodiments described herein relate generally to method and apparatus for video analytics and management regarding moving cameras. In particular, but not by way of limitation, some embodiments described herein relate to methods and apparatus for protecting privacy in videos recorded with moving cameras such as body-worn cameras, vehicle cameras, or cameras of unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones), and/or the like.
Moving cameras are often used in public spaces and produce massive amounts of data every day. The videos recorded by the moving cameras are often stored locally, uploaded to a server, or streamed live. It is beneficial to protect the privacy of individuals appearing in the videos when these videos are released publically and/or when explicit consent to the video recording is not provided by the individuals. Privacy protection might also be desirable in cases of nonpublic disclosure of the videos. For example, when a video is used as forensic evidence, it would be beneficial to protect the privacy of persons not involved in an incident captured by the video.
Some known systems require manually marking privacy-related information. This can be time consuming, expensive, and hence infeasible for a large amount of data. It is also challenging to automatically select privacy-related information in videos generated by moving cameras. In addition, some known moving cameras can generate additional data along with the series of image frames associated with the video. Such data can include, for example, audio or certain types of metadata such as Global Positioning System (“GPS”) coordinates, time stamps, and/or user information. Such data may implicitly violate the privacy of an individual and therefore should also be considered in a privacy protective system. Accordingly, a need exists for methods and apparatus to automatically or semi-automatically protect privacy in data recorded by moving cameras.